Instagram announced Stories way back in August last year which was an obvious move by Facebook to counter Snapchat by copying their Stories feature. Over time, they have improved it by making it easy to send those ephemeral stories to your friends, positioning them on Explore and adding fun stickers for use.
Facebook also added that 150 million people use Instagram Stories every month and it was not clear how this was affecting Snapchat. Well now we know thanks to a report made by TechCrunch.
Apparently analytic providers, talent managers and social media celebrities told the publication that their Stories view counts have dropped between 15 to 40percent which is worrying. On Instagram sides, a talent agent told the publication that the engagement on Instagram Stories is very high which means that Instagram is winning this war.
That is not all. A CEO of a creative studio and social video analytics platform (Delmondo) analyzed 21,500 Snapchat Stories and it revealed a “steep” decline (about 40%) between August and November 2016. This falls in line with the timeline Instagram was bolstering Instagram Stories.
However, the problem of declining view counts on Snapchat Stories could be Snap’s own doing. They removed the Auto-Advance feature which made you watch every Story on your list in a row.
Snapchat was a lot of work to do to retain its active users and further grow its user base. The onslaught of Instagram Stories is diverting interest to the much larger platform and decisions like removing the auto-advance feature means that people will continue to notice lower view counts.
